Democracy

Francis Fukuyama predicted in his book The End of History that democracy is the end of human political development, while Alexis de Tocqueville believed that socialism would menace democracy. In my 2005 book Socialism in America, I argued that socialism supplants democracy. Indeed, a decade later, socialist Bernie Sanders became a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nominee. This book argues that Fukuyama is wrong because democracy carries the seeds of its own destruction—of which socialism is just one kernel—by illustrating the reasons why democracy will fail in America from a broader perspective. The ideals of freedom, equality and justice in early democracy change due to the nature of democracy itself, resulting in loss of freedom, inequality, injustice, concentration of power, relative morality and divisiveness. From this, single-mindedness, intolerance and loss of civility emanate—traits that are endemic in America today. There is an inevitable collusion between majority rule and humankind’s inability to control passion that propels democracies through a natural lifecycle and explains why history shows us that democracies are rare, are short-lived, and usually end in dictatorships. History is cyclical, and democracy is just one of the cycles that naturally becomes something it once was not, which is why America’s Founding Fathers would not recognize democracy in our country today. This book describes why history’s longest experiment with democracy will end and how it may become a dictatorship. This is the story of democracy in America.